A North Germanic language and the official tongue of Denmark — famous for soft "d" sounds, glottal stops (stød), and being notoriously hard to pronounce.
Where it’s spoken
Danish is the official language of Denmark and a co-official language in Greenland and the Faroe Islands. Small communities of native speakers persist in Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany. Danish is mutually intelligible in writing with Norwegian Bokmål and Swedish, but spoken Danish is notoriously hard for other Scandinavians to understand.
What it sounds like
Danish features the stød — a creaky-voice glottal articulation that can distinguish word meanings. Many consonants are weakened: the “d” between vowels softens almost to nothing, and “t” can become a fricative. Danish has one of the largest vowel inventories of any Germanic language.
How it’s written
Danish uses the Latin alphabet plus æ, ø, and å — the last of these (called “bolle-å”) replaced the older “aa” digraph in 1948, though “Aalborg” is still spelled traditionally. Spelling preserves silent consonants that are no longer pronounced.
History
Old Danish split from Old Norse in the early medieval period. The 1550 Danish Bible established a written standard. Danish lost its grammatical case system early, becoming one of the most analytic Germanic languages.
Find more languages by letter
Danish starts with D and ends with H. Browse other languages along the same letter.
Languages that contain a letter from "Danish":